‘Your sort always can.’
‘What do you mean - “my sort”?’
‘Middle-class wankers.’
Brian closed his eyes to shut out, if only momentarily, the sight of them. He found it almost impossible to believe that something so unspeakably dreadful was taking place. Brian was not a brave man. He could not even read the word ‘ordeal’ without a symbiotic flutter in his chest. Now as his bowels gave a slow cold churn he squeezed them tight, praying they would not leak. So much for grace under pressure.
‘Now listen, Cuntface,’ Denzil was saying in an easy, conversational manner. Brian assumed an expression of unearthly alertness. ‘See this?’
Denzil clenched his fist and the blue dots in the loose crinkly skin of his knuckles stretched themselves to read ‘GT BTN’.
‘Now you know,’ quavered Brian, ‘violence doesn’t solve anything.’
‘Don’t see how you make that out,’ argued Denzil. ‘You mess with his sister. We screw you to the wall. You leave her alone. Problem solved.’
‘But you can’t live like that,’ cried Brian, who would have been charmed by such disreputable logic had it surfaced in an improvisation.
‘You know a better way?’ asked Collar, with apparently genuine curiosity.
Brian stared around the ring of severe young faces and recognised his cause was hopeless. No point in searching for a flicker of sympathy or a weak link. As a last resort he started to whine.
‘What have I ever done to you?’ Silence. ‘Except to try and open up your pathetic lives a bit.’ The silence became slightly unpleasant. ‘Show you a more glamorous world. Introduce you to—’
Tom cut Brian short by raising his own right hand in a formal and very serious manner. He looked implacable and right and deeply authoritative.
‘There’s nothing else to say. We want half now, by which I mean tomorrow afternoon. And half Friday.’
‘And suppose I get it,’ said Brian, knowing he supposed the impossible.
‘We give you the tape.’
A tape! Of course. That explained the blurred prints and funny paper. Then, understanding this, various other incidents suddenly became significant. Her refusal to put the lights off. The music, which he had thought so romantic, was probably necessary to cover any sound from the camcorder. Oh! Edie of the sweet ginger ruff. Snake of my bosom. Viperette.
Hang about. Brian recalled the day, two terms ago now, when he had brought his brand-new Sanyo along to video rehearsals and it had disappeared. Could this possibly ... ?
‘What machine did you—’
‘We got a contact in Slough.’ Denzil had a nasty habit of running the tip of his tongue over the palm of his hand then stroking his scalp, repeating the movement over and over again. Brian had often wondered what his hand must taste like at the end of it.
‘He runs a little business.’ Collar took up the story. ‘Educational films.’
They all looked at each other and then at Brian in a way that made it clear the meeting was at an end. Brian got up and prepared once more to travel that vast Sahara of sand-coloured interlocking blocks of wood. He had finally reached the door when Edie called his name.
‘Yes.’ Brian wheeled around and began to hurry back, suddenly light of foot. ‘Yes, Edie - what is it?’
Edie, who had been fishing inside her Green Bay Packers jacket, now produced what looked like a piece of rag but was Brian’s underpants. She threw them on to the floor. They were inside out and a thin, brown smear was clearly visible. The idea came to Brian that he would turn and walk away. Show his contempt by leaving them. Then he wondered if the group might tell everyone. Perhaps even pass them round. He bent and picked them up.
This time he had barely reached the halfway mark when the call came. He didn’t turn round. Just stayed quite still, heart pounding with premonitory fright, stuffing his Y-fronts into his trouser pocket.
The voices started again. All of them at once. Not harsh and sneering as they had been before, but wheedling, seeming to beckon in a friendly way. Joshing him.
Brian, finding himself as he thought on the cutting edge of mass ridicule, almost ran the last few steps. Grabbing the handle, he swung the door open.
‘Don’t,’ Edie cried. ‘Brian? Don’t go.’
Now she was hurrying towards him, seizing his arm, persuading him towards her. Brian sensed rather than saw the rest of them, approaching in a clump behind her. Within seconds they were all about him too, urging him back into the centre of the room in a vigorous but jovial manner, little Bor actually tugging at his hand.
‘Whatcha think, Bri?’
‘Was it good?’
‘He really fell for it - didn’t you?’
‘He was in a recruitment mode in every sphere.’
‘In every cocking sphere.’
‘Can’t see it in the play, though. Can you, Bri?’
‘Nah. Can’t see this ...’ Suddenly Denzil had in his hand a flat black shining case. He started throwing it up into the air, spinning it, catching it again. Winking at Brian. ‘Actually in what you might call “the play”.’
‘You’re not mad are you, love?’ Edie linked up just as she had when they were drinking the Thunderbirds Mixed and smiled into Brian’s face. An open, guileless smile, full of confidence, expecting praise. ‘It was only an impro.’
Only an impro. Only an impro. Brian trembled and shook in an agony of hope and bewilderment and rage. Surely it could not be so. They would never have the wit or imagination or discipline to dream up and carry through such a scenario. They were too stupid. Thick. Cretinous. Moronic. Hateful in their vacuous self-esteem. Loathsome in their self-congratulation.
‘You said we could do our own. Don’t you remember?’
‘Last week.’
‘No harm done, ay Bri?’
Christ, they’d be asking him next if he couldn’t take a joke.
‘And we put a twist in the tail - like you said.’
‘A coody theatre.’
‘To “astound and amaze”.’
‘I know what he’s worried about.’ Denzil threw the tape. Brian snatched at the air and seized the box.
‘Is this the ... ?’
‘That’s it.’
‘The one and only.’
‘Refuse all substitutes.’
Brian unzipped his windcheater and put the tape inside. There was a long pause then, when Brian did not speak the circle around him started to break up. Denzil moved away to the parallel bars, released one of the ropes and started to swarm up it. The others, at a loose end, stared at Brian as if awaiting direction. They appeared, now that the fun was over, about to slip into their usual state of misanthropic lethargy.
‘We got half an hour yet, Bri.’
‘Don’t call me “Bri”.’
‘What shall we do, though?’
‘Do what you like.’ Brian felt the tape, the one and only, hard and safe against his concave chest. ‘Drop dead for all I care.’
He never intended to enter the gym again. All the stimulating and creative work that had taken place there was as ashes, dirty ashes, in his mouth.
‘Aren’t we rehearsing, then?’ asked little Bor.
‘I must have been mad to have ever wasted five minutes let alone five months of my life on any of you. Or to have thought that the stinking squalid sewers that pass for minds in your tiny pointed heads could ever begin to understand the first thing about literature or music or drama. I suggest you all crawl back to the gutter where you so obviously belong. And as far as I’m concerned you can stay there and rot.’
The briefing had been an arid business. Barnaby, having no definite lead, genuine insight or any sort of meaningful inspiration, was not a man to bluff and bluster his way towards giving the impression that he did. Nor did he blame the fact that he found himself thus high and dry on his team. That there were many officers, some far senior to himself, who would not have hesitated to do so was hardly a consolation.